1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to online advertising and the generation of web pages.
2. Background
A search engine is an information retrieval system used to locate documents and other information stored on a computer system. Search engines are useful for reducing the amount of time required to find information. One well known type of search engine is a Web search engine which searches for documents, such as web pages, on the “World Wide Web” (also known as “the Web”). Examples of such search engines include Yahoo! Search™ (at yahoo.com), Microsoft Bing ™ (at bing.com), Ask.com ™ (at ask.com), and Google ™ (at google.com). Online services such as LexisNexis™ and Westlaw™ also enable users to search for documents provided by their respective services, including articles and court opinions. Other types of search engines include personal search engines, mobile search engines, and enterprise search engines that search on intranets, among others.
To perform a search, a user of a search engine typically enters a query into a search box of the search engine. The query contains one or more words/terms, such as “hazardous waste” or “country music.” The terms of the query are typically selected by the user as an attempt to find particular information of interest to the user. The search engine returns a list of documents relevant to the query. For a Web-based search, the search engine typically also returns a list of uniform resource locator (URL) addresses for the relevant documents, which is displayed to the user in a search results page. If the scope of the search resulting from a query is large, the returned results may include thousands or even millions of documents.
“Sponsored search” refers to a form of Internet advertising/marketing that enables advertisers to increase their visibility in the results page of a search engine query. According to sponsored search, an advertiser may pay or provide other compensation for having an advertisement appear in a sponsored section of the results page for one or more particular queries. A user who enters one of the queries into the search engine is provided with a results page that includes the advertisement in the sponsored search section. The sponsored search section is prominently displayed in the results page, to enable the user to easily see and interact with the advertisement. In this manner, an advertiser is enabled to provide advertisements to users that are directly related to their queries, and a search engine owner/operator is enabled to further monetize the search engine.
Sponsored search advertisers are enabled to match their advertisements with desired search results by bidding on keywords. An auction may be performed among multiple advertisers who bid in order to have their advertisements shown next to search results for specific keywords. An advertisement associated with submitted keywords that match the search query (and having a winning bid) may be displayed on search results pages for the search query. Output bidding is another bidding mechanism for sponsored search, where advertisers bid on search result URLs (uniform resource locator) rather than on keywords in input search queries. For example, an advertiser may want an advertisement to appear whenever search results include a site having the URL imdb.com instead of bidding on keywords that lead to this site (such as movie titles, actor names, etc).
The search engine entry box has become the starting point for many tasks related to the Web. It enables searching to be performed, but also enables users to navigate to websites. Often, a search, or a group of related searches will cause a search system to retrieve results pointing to the same URL that is dominant within the content domain associated with the search query. For example, searches associated with movie related topics often lead to the Internet Movie Database™ (at imdb.com) as a search result. Searches associated with weather related topics often lead to The Weather Channel™ (at weather.com) as a search result. Other groups of related searches may lead to other associates URLs that dominate the search space.
As such, for some topics, URLs exist that span an entire or large domain of keywords related to the topics, appearing among the top search results in response to queries for those topics. Utilizing output bidding, advertisers may bid on the URL and gain excellent advertisement coverage a large number of related keywords. However, there are many topics without a dominant URL that comprehensively covers the topics.